Upstagram: a Flying Raspberry Pi

This tiny paper house, modeled after the one in Disney’s UP, contains a Raspberry Pi, battery pack, camera, and 3G stick. The Upstagram, built by the folks at HackerLoop, took to the skies of Paris to snap and share photos on Instagram.

We’ve seen Raspberry Pis in flight before, but this build pulls it off using simple party balloons. It took around 80 balloons to get the house to a height of 300 feet. A kite string was used to tether the device and control its flight.

This hack also required some reverse engineering of Instagram. Since the photo sharing service only allows the official Android and iOS apps to upload, they had to use a reverse engineered Instagram client. This allows the unsupported Raspberry Pi to interact with the service, snapping pictures periodically and sharing them on the device’s stream.

5 thoughts on “Upstagram: a Flying Raspberry Pi”

And why is that so important? If instagram does not support it then what is the need to use it? A simple ftp client (built into all linux distros including the ones for RPi) would have done the job. (with lot of ftp space available for free on internet)